Pjusk Blog — Pjusk at Yaga Gathering 2019

Pjusk

Pjusk is a Norwegian ambient project.

It is always great being invited back to a festival and recently we had this honour by being back to Yaga Gathering in Lithuania - 2019. In addition to our live audio set, we brought our new live video setup that we honestly think works wonders bundled with our music. We sincerely hope this will be part of our modus operandi in the years to come.

We were not the only ones present, of course, and had the joy of meeting with Christian Kleine and his girl friend. Christian is working at Ableton, Berlin responsible for developing the Max4Live part of Ableton Live and is closely operating together with Cycling in development of this tool. Always inspiring meeting with both talented and nice people! Christian is also responsible for the Max4Cats website that we really recommend visiting. We (Pjusk) are currently preparing for a Max/MSP course for the rest of the year - so expect us to be back with some exciting new sounds.

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Posted on

August 22, 2019

Events

Quick and easy gating/stutter effects

Using some sort of stutter or gating effects can quickly turn almost any sound into something that has a nice rhythmic quality. We often turn to these small tricks to transform different field recordings or sounds that are more drone like into material that has either a very distinct and clear rhythm or to something that just has a small, almost inconceivable pulse to give our sound that extra bit of life or gradual change throughout a track.

Tools & Tech

A sprinkle of randomness

To put it simply, our music is often some repetitive parts built up from some number of layers. These parts usually come from recordings of analog synthesizers, VST instruments or different sources of acoustic and electric instruments like guitars, piano and wind instruments. The parts are organized in an arrangement where we bring in and out different parts over the duration of a tune. We feel that monotony and repetition are an important core of music in the ambient genre regardless of what sub-genre within ambient we are talking about. To make monotonous and repetitive music interesting over time we need something more, and for us that usually means to sprinkle our music with some randomness.

Tools & Tech

Ableton Live

Quite quickly after forming Pjusk we discovered Ableton Live. It was live at first sight. Live version 4. With its equally good automation features and easiness of looping. It had everything that Acid had, and then some. The automation features in Live was even better than in Acid, as we could have automation both on clips as well as tracks.

Pjusk at Yaga Gathering 2019

Pjusk

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Quick and easy gating/stutter effects

A sprinkle of randomness

Ableton Live